A couple of trade shows ago, a couple of exhibitors half-jokingly berated me for never taking samples, trinkets or tchotchkes from their booth; it's not them, it's me--after three decades in this industry, I have enough pens, pads, collapsible drink cups and phone charger cords to last six lifetimes; not to mention more shampoos, skin creams and sun care formulas than I could ever use.

Kachun's study is a richly documented exploration of actual, potential, and proposed efforts to memorialize iconic Crispus Attucks in monuments, in song, in plays, in school textbooks, in scholarship, in Bicentennial tchotchkes, in commemorative celebrations, and in other formulations.

The camera follows Gela, a traveling trader, as he purchases goods at a secondhand store in the city--a combination of tchotchkes like plastic clothes brushes, sequin purses, and plastic bubble wands and necessities like lightbulbs and toilet paper--and travels to a rural village, where he exchanges his goods for potatoes with villagers who have no other currency in which to trade, and then goes back to the city, where he sells the potatoes and starts the whole process over again.

But when we [talk about] it outside of the U.S., it takes on a different connotation, in the sense it's women creating tchotchkes on the side of the road, not mobile payments or Wi-Fi routers that are really changing the nature of the economy of their communities and moving the needle forward.

Once he ascends, Lenny renames himself Pius XIII, but he might as well have gone with Donald II: Brash, vindictive, and self-obsessed, he bullies his rivals, asserts his singular greatness, and demands that the church buy back some gilded tchotchkes that his predecessors, in a good-faith effort to economize, had sold off.

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